Apple took the lead in the smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2011 as the sector saw explosive growth of 54.7% year-on-year to 157.8m units, and now makes up around one of every three mobile phones shipped worldwide.

The launch of the iPhone 4S early in October meant that Apple pushed out Samsung, shipping 37m units to the estimated 36m from the south Korean company, according to the research company IDC.

The preliminary figures did not show market shares for the different operating systems, but trends in the market have suggested that Google's Android, used by the majority of Samsung and HTC smartphones, has been heading for a 50% or greater share of shipments.

"The launch of Apple's iPhone 4S played a key role in smartphone growth to capture pent-up demand, and smartphone launches from other vendors also provided a broad selection to meet varying preferences and budgets," said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team.

Apple's 37m figure was a 128% increase on the 16.2m of the same time in 2010. But it was Samsung which saw the most dramatic growth, almost quadrupling from 9.6m a year ago.

HTC, another major Android manufacturer - though it also produces some Windows Phone devices - recorded growth, to 10.2m from 8.7m. But that was less than the market as a whole, and HTC on Monday announced disappointing financial results for the quarter, with revenues and profits both falling year-on-year by 2.5% and 12% respectively. The Taiwanese company admitted that products it launched in the quarter "are not selling as well as we expected", according to chief financial officer Winston Yung - but forecast a further fall in the first quarter of 2012.

Nokia, once the dominant force in the market, saw its share fall to 12.4% as it shipped 19.6m handsets - down from 28.1m in the period a year ago. The figures do not break out how many of them were running Microsoft's new Windows Phone software, which it began selling in November with the Lumia 800, and how many its deprecated Symbian platform. The company's financial figures in January implied that it shipped fewer than a million before the end of December.

RIM, which is struggling to keep its BlackBerry platform relevant to business in the face of onslaughts from Apple and Android, managed to grow its shipments, to 10.2m from 8.7m, but saw its market share dip from 8.5% to 6.5%. The company has since replaced its chief executives and chairmen.

For the year as a whole, just over 491m smartphones were shipped, with Samsung dominating, followed by Apple, with 94m and 93.2m respectively - 19.1% and 19% of the total market overall. Nokia (15.7%) and RIM (10.4%) both managed to eke out more than 10%, but much of the rest of the growth has come from Chinese handset makers such as ZTE and Huawei and others aiming at their home markets, where smartphone sales were larger than any other country.

"So-called 'hero' devices, such as Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and Apple's iPhone 4S, garner the bulk of the attention heaped on the device type," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker program. "But a growing number of sub-$250 device offerings, based on the Android operating system, have allowed Google's hardware partners to grow smartphone volumes and expand the market concurrently."

Overall, the smartphone market grew by 61.3% between 2010 and 2011 - suggesting a slight slowdown in growth in the fourth quarter. Some analysts think that those two years have seen the biggest surge in shipments, with 2010 showing 75% growth. The dominance of the smartphone over the PC has also been cemented, outselling them in every quarter - a trend that first occurred in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Analysts think 2012 will see less rapid smartphone shipment growth - which also implies problems for Microsoft and Nokia in trying to establish Windows Phone as a "third ecosystem" in the market, with Android and Apple's iOS consuming around 75% of the market, and Symbian and RIM the rest. That has so far left little room for Windows Phone except, so far, in replacement of some Symbian sales in Europe.